Spain's frontier movement in North American planted Hispanic civilisation in much of the future United States beginning with Ponce de Le+¦n's arrival in Florida in 1513. This book is the first all-inclusive treatment of the Spanish Borderlands in over fifty years. After describing the travels of the conquistador explorers, it continues through three centuries of mission, presidio, and town development in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. As the Anglo-American frontier pushed westward, the Spanish frontier was increasingly a defensive one, and here the clashes between the two are fully explained, as are international rivalries involving the English, French, and even Russian pressures that affected the frontier.